Solar Dehydrator

Team Members: Pek Yong, Elena and Yu Quan

Background:
Food wastage has been a constant problem many countries including Singapore face, mainly due to the excessive amount of food we have and consume. With the rate of global food production, we do have sufficient food to feed everyone in the world, yet many are still facing hunger. This has been a problem due to the consumption practice of the people, and the unequal distribution of food. To solve this problem, we have designed a solar-powered dehydrator to ease and encourage food preservation.

Problem Statement:
How might we design an off-grid solar-powered dehydrator to ease and encourage food preservation among household to reduce food wastage in Singapore?

Our Solution:
Our team have designed a solar dehydrator with the following features:

• Made up of common household items, such as container and black tray. This allow the possibility of selling conversion kit to household, while household use their pre-exisiting items to construct it. This further cut down waste.
• Consist of ventilation fan, which remove humidity within the enclosure at night and prevent battery from overheating
• Solar panel and batteries that charges during the day to power the fan
• Enclosure design traps and allow passive heating from the Sun to dry the food

Future Improvements:
We hope to improve the following:

• Implement a back up heating source that switch on at night for drying food
• Change the battery from lead-acid to lithum-based battery, as it have a higher specific energy.
• Increase the capacity of the battery to cater a higher day of autonomy
• Increase solar panel wattage to cater to months of low sunlight
• Use a microcontroller to switch on or off the load, dependent on the temperature and humidity within the enclosure

Skills Involved: Arduino, Electrical (Circuits, Battery and Solar Panel sizing), Design Thinking

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